I'm not quite familiar with GitHub Actions, but Azure DevOps Pipeline has a nice Preview API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/pipe... which runs the preprocessing steps(like running the C preprocessor on a C source file) then gives you the processed yaml file. Then if you'd like, you can write your own local runner based on that if your yaml files do not use too many different kinds Azure DevOps pipeline steps.